Pendennis: The Observer diary

You wanna sit next to Clint? Yours for £1,500

Film aficionados watching this year's Bafta awards on 8 February should look out for interlopers.

Among the glamorous likes of nominees Kate Winslet, Angelina Jolie, Brad Pitt and Clint Eastwood will be punters who have paid £1,500 for the privilege of being there, in contravention of the rules of the academy, which fears the starry event would be devalued if its invitation-only status is lost.

The tickets are being offered by several online "concierge" companies. Sources suggest that they are passed on to these firms by corporate sponsors, perhaps those whose entertaining budgets have been credit-crunched.

A representative of one concierge company emailed me last week to offer tickets, but wouldn't share the details of their provenance.

"I can not give you my source for tickets. They are all from marketing partners," I was told.

A Bafta spokesman says: "The tickets are not for sale through a third party. They are marked clearly that they are not for resale and access would be denied if people were found to be using them."

The Renaissance Club is another of the organisations selling tickets. It advertised access to the awards themselves and dinner.

"You will be within TV camera shots," its website boasted.

A Renaissance Club spokesman told me they secured their tickets from an organisation called Total Management.

When I called Total Management, they admit to working with the Renaissance Club but deny they are offering tickets for sale, saying they just "put people in touch" with Bafta sometimes. Some moments later, a Renaissance spokesman calls back and insists they didn't mean to sell the tickets after all.

Fortunately for anyone with £1,500 to spare, a quick Google search will reveal other concierge firms still offering tickets for the same price.

Tories weave a tangled Web

Dave Cameron's merry men have just bought a top listing on Google for the name "Gordon Brown", which they link to an online campaign video about the PM's fiscal dilemmas. At the end of December, I asked a Tory spokesman about buying up search-engine-sponsored links, when I noticed that a website in support of, but not run by, the Lib Dems had bought "David Cameron". Their reply was: "We do more Google advertising than any other party, but we've always focused on promoting ourselves rather than attacking opponents." A month is a long time in politics.

If Obama fails, we can count on Blair

Another new project comes to light for Tony Blair. Documents filed at Companies House show that the former PM is in the process of setting up yet another charity to add to his Faith Foundation and his Sports Foundation.

This one's called the Tony Blair Governance Initiative.

Its aim appears to be to spread good governance around the globe and one expert suggests it may be a vehicle for Tony to use on the world stage should Barack Obama hesitate to endorse him as the Quartet's Middle East envoy.

Endearingly, the Companies House documents include a section stating that Blair's permission must be sought should anyone want to change the organisation's name.

A class act

Some months back, Labour MP Chris Ruane discovered that the committees appointing ambassadors were disproportionally full of the privately educated and Oxbridge graduates. Now he says not a single committee member comes from an ethnic minority. So he's going to dig into the backgrounds of the ambassadors: "Any way you look at it, it's a closed shop."

Have they got News for you

A footnote to the sale of London's Evening Standard to Alexander Lebedev, who's been written up as a former KGB agent but is these days a smooth operator with a social conscience. City man and educational philanthropist Justin Byam Shaw, one of the directors of Lebedev's UK holding company, Evening News Ltd, is an old friend of Lib Dem leader Nick Clegg, and was best man at the wedding of Geordie Greig, Tatler editor and another Evening News shareholder, tipped to take over as editor of the Standard. Happy families.

He's unspeakable

Commons speaker Michael Martin was absent from his chair on Thursday afternoon which, according to MPs, has become something of a habit. Martin tends to disappear at about 12.30pm and not reappear in the chamber until Mondays at 2.30pm, even though the Commons sits until supper time most Thursdays and occasionally on a Friday. Briefing against Martin is a sport for certain politicians, but a glance through the official parliamentary report, Hansard, suggests that there's truth to this charge.

Roman on the rocks

In this time of global economic crisis, even oligarchs are making sacrifices. Pictured on holiday last week in the Caribbean, Roman Abramovich was wearing a pair of floral print swimming trunks in the style so beloved of celebrities and the rich. It's impossible to overlook the fact, however, that they were not genuine St Tropez-based Vilebrequin (£100) trunks, but a cheap imitation. This allies him, sartorially at least, with Dave Cameron. Tony Blair always wears the real thing.